Taking the Complexity Out of Business Intelligence

By: Michael Vizard

May 7, 2009 - If time is money and business intelligence is about finding out where the money is, then it stands to reason that time to value is going to be a critical issue when it comes to rolling out business intelligence applications.

Ever since the start of the downturn, IT organizations have been under pressure to get usable business intelligence tools into the hands of end users. Oracle has taken that requirement to an interesting new level by rolling out what amount to pre-built business intelligence applications.

In what company executives describe as business intelligence in a box, the basic idea is to quickly give end users sets of analytical applications that can be customized, but already come pre-configured to create a dashboard that tracks standard sets of business processes.

As time goes on, most customers will want to customize and extend those applications. But in the short time it allows Oracle to credibly claim it can deliver business intelligence value without creating a whole lot of additional overhead cost in terms of services requirements.

It will be interesting to see how this trend plays out. ERP applications essentially gained acceptance by delivering packaged applications around a specific business process. The same concept should apply to business intelligence applications given the fact that there are a lot of standard processes that most end users want to track.

This doesn't mean that over time there won't continue to be a lot of customization of business intelligence applications, but it does make people wonder if one of the things that holds up the ubiquitous adoption of business intelligence software the simple fact that we have made it far too complex to initially adopt.

Source: http://blogs.eweek.com/masked_intentions/content/enterprise_applications/taking_the_complexity_out_of_business_intelligence.html

Other News